DEC hatchery finishing up seasonal salmon egg collection on the Salmon River

Despite an autumn marked by high water levels, staff at the Salmon River fish hatchery in Altmar were on schedule this week to finish their annual salmon egg collection.

“We finished up with the chinooks on Tuesday and have a total of 3.2 million,” said Andy Greulich, hatchery manager at the state Department of Environmental Conservation facility. “We’ll take in a few more cohos, but we should be finishing up this week.”

Greulich said the hatchery’s goal is to collect 1.4 million coho salmon eggs.

The eggs are fertilized and then raised at the hatchery, generating millions of fingerlings. The chinooks will be stocked in Lake Ontario this spring; the cohos, during the fall, Greulich said.

Each fall, the spawning fish swim right into the hatchery, where workers take them out of the water and slit open the underbelly of the females for their eggs and squeeze the males for their sperm (milt).

Ulike the spring walleye egg collection on Oneida Lake, during which the fish are returned to Scriba Creek and eventually to the lake, the migrating salmon in Altmar are killed at the hatchery, or die naturally in the stream. The carcasses of those fish handled by the hatchery staff are composted in a big, above-ground pit with wood chips on the hatchery grounds, Greulich said.

Not all the fish the hatchery takes in for eggs are killed. In the spring, workers do an egg take on spawning steelhead, which are released back into the river to return to the lake.

The hatchery manager said the high water levels this fall initially caused some concern for the salmon egg take.

“We held off a little bit,” Greulich said. “The water temperature was right, but it was murky.”

Hatchery workers began collecting the eggs Oct. 7.

“The eggs are put afterward (in containers filled with river water) at the hatchery,” he said. “We were concerned about possibly putting in too much silt with the eggs. However, the water cleared up and it didn’t present a problem.”

Greulich said there were “an amazing amount of jacks (one-year-old males) in the run, and the females were bigger than usual. We were getting about two quarts of eggs per fish.”

He noticed one more thing.

“We had a steady stream of steelhead through the whole time,” he said. “There are still lots of them in the river.”